Platell’s People: Not having children’s a tragedy not a soundbite for TV, Lisa

Lisa Snowdon, 44, spoke of missing out on motherhood in I’m A Celebrity...

Lisa Snowdon is more beautiful than anyone has a right to be, with a body that we can only dream of having. She is clever and moved easily from modelling to TV presenting.

Her five-year, on/off affair with George Clooney was enough to make most of us girls want to have spent at least a few moments actually being her.

Yet, at just 44, her gilded life seems a little tarnished. She is wearing a bikini in the Australian jungle — and as we know, I’m A Celebrity . . . is the last resort for TV stars with failing careers.

But it’s not just her modelling and TV work that are vanishing. So, it seems, are her chances of becoming a mother.

When asked by a fellow failed celeb in the jungle if she wanted children, she said: ‘Not now. It’s a weird one because it’s so hard. I left it kind of late. I didn’t find anybody that I wanted to actually be with and I didn’t want to have kids . . . just to have kids.’

She spoke of missing out on motherhood as casually as most of us would talk about missing a bus or a train. There’ll be another one along soon.

Yet when a woman reaches her 40s, very often there isn’t. The chances of conceiving a first child naturally after 40 are remote, by 45 nigh impossible.

Lisa is among a growing number of women in their 40s — one in six — who are childless. Some are in that position by choice, and I respect that decision. Better not be a mum than a reluctant one. But most women do want to be mothers. It’s just that they leave it too late. An Office For National Statistics report this week said the explosion of job and life opportunities for women born in the Sixties and Seventies has led to a childless generation, with 17 per cent without a family of their own.

I tried for years to have children, but was unable to become pregnant. I don’t cry when I pass babyGap in the High Street any more, but the sadness of never having the child I longed for is part of the warp and weft of my life, a tapestry I would never have chosen.

Women like Lisa may believe their careers and fabulous lifestyles are more important than anything else.

Nights out celebrating your latest modelling shoot or promotion might seem more beguiling at the time than sleepless nights with a new baby.

Until one day you realise something is missing. You watch friends get pregnant, see their glorious, troublesome children grow up and the enrichment they bring to their parents’ lives.

And you wonder: was the career ladder really more rewarding than a child’s climbing frame? Judging by Lisa’s decision to appear in the tawdry TV jungle show, almost certainly not.

‘Why would a highly intelligent, middle-aged woman endure cosmetic procedures to freeze her face . . . and so publicly flick her hair and flash her buxom bosom?’

A brief perusal of social media might offer a clue. Carol is the UK’s most lusted-after woman over 50. She’s also ‘bonding’ with jungle mate Joel Dommett, 30.

Carol is proof that even at 55, you can be utterly desirable — something that wizened old Lynne Franks can only dream of.

Rowling back the years

JK Rowling could have passed for a Hollywood actress at the launch of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them

For a woman who says that she wants to be judged on her writing and not her looks, JK Rowling went to some extraordinary lengths to look sensational at the launch of her latest movie, Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them.

In a shimmering silver dress, the 51-year-old author (pictured) — who was once as dowdy and unsexy as her creation Sybill Trelawney, the bottle-spectacled professor of divination at Hogwarts — could have passed for a Hollywood actress.

How lucky for Rowling that she doesn’t have to resort to the knife. Otherwise we’d be calling her next blockbuster movie Fantastic Cosmetic Surgeons And Where To Find Them.

Feminists applauded Hillary Clinton’s first speech since losing the election.

Without a scrap of make-up and looking exhausted, she said she didn’t even want to leave the house, preferring to curl up on the sofa with a good book and her dog.

So Bill came in useful after all.

Looking no older than when JR used to knock her about on Dallas in the Eighties, Linda Gray is to star in C4’s Hollyoaks.

‘I’m 76 and feel amazing — maybe better than I did when I was younger,’ she says. You have to admire a gal who can go from 90 million viewers on Dallas to 900,000 on Hollyoaks, and still smile through the Botox.

She was 19, he was 33 and a married father of two. The affair lasted three months.

‘It was a long one-night stand,’ she says.

‘I was relieved when it ended. I didn’t approve of myself.’

Nor, I imagine, did Ford’s then wife, Mary Marquardt.

Fisher says she doesn’t remember much about the actual affair — so was Harrison that bad in bed?

Don’t cry, kids, Bambi’s all right

David Attenborough's sensationally successful BBC series Planet Earth II has been criticised for being too cruel.

Parents are particularly exercised as it shows in graphic detail the hunted lives of creatures such as a baby Nubian Ibex — think Bambi — stranded on the sheer slopes of its mountain home in the Israeli desert.

Why the fuss? Why don’t they just tell their children what my mum always did when we watched shows like this together — that the moment they stopped filming, the crew rescued Bambi and everyone lived happily ever after.

The dying wish of a 14-year-old girl was that she should not be ‘buried underground’, but that her body be cryogenically frozen so, if a cure for her cancer was found, doctors could wake her up and she could live again. A wonderful dream and who could deny a child her last request?

Yet isn’t there something deeply distasteful that, in a world of instant solutions, a mercenary cryogenics industry is deluding even children into the belief that they can defy death?

Shame on them for the tragic divisions their pipe dreams bring to grieving families.

WESTMINSTER NOTICEBOARD

Porky Ed Glitter Balls went on the BBC Today programme to discuss his academic paper about how independent the Bank of England should be. How can this besequinned sausage expect us to take him seriously when tonight he will be lowered to the Blackpool Strictly stage from the ceiling, playing a piano and singing Great Balls Of Fire? Let’s hope the roof’s reinforced.

Diplomats warn that our EU exit will mean a £60 billion divorce bill. How apt. As in so many modern divorces, we have paid through the nose for decades, have wanted to leave a miserable marriage for years — and now have to pay a fortune to get out.

She's only been PM for four months, yet Theresa May has had more wardrobe changes than policies. Her latest was turning up at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in a sleeveless red frock with a revealing slit up the back. More Desperate Housewives than British PM, I’m afraid. And sleeveless? Not with those batwings, love.

David Cameron is snapped out shopping with wife Sam shrouded in a hoodie. How ironic that the man who once encouraged us to hug a jobless hoodie finds himself out of work and bereft of hugs himself.

It took 12 police officers in a dawn raid to arrest two female pensioners who tried to stop lime trees that have stood in their street for more than a century from being cut down.

Jenny Hockey, 70, and Freda Brayshaw, 71, were arrested at 5am and held in a cell for eight hours. This in the week when a judge praised two Greenpeace activists for being ‘principled’ after defacing Nelson’s Column and causing £35,000 damage — then let them walk free.

Let’s hope these tree-loving women receive the same leniency.

Ahead of the launch of his new ‘Not Top Gear’ TV series yesterday, Jeremy Clarkson claimed he was banned from boarding a flight by an airport worker

Jezza’s flight of fancy

Ahead of the launch of his new ‘Not Top Gear’ TV series yesterday, Jeremy Clarkson claimed he was banned from boarding a flight by an airport worker, who said: ‘I’m from Argentina, so f*** off.’

Argentina was, of course, the country Clarkson had to flee when filming the last series of Top Gear, after driving through it in a Porsche with the licence plate H982 FKL, which many took as a pointed reference to the 1982 Falklands War.

It turns out the airport worker was Spanish, not Argentinian, and the petrol-head oaf missed his flight because he had lingered too long in the lounge and got to the departure gate too late.

Abusive, fibbing and aggressive . . . it looks like now he’s free from the restraints of the BBC, Clarkson is handling his own PR. At least no one got punched.

Gareth Southgate for England football boss? Why not? Instead of giving him a £3 million-a-year deal, like his predecessor Sam Allardyce, who lasted just 67 days and got a £1 million payoff, he should be rewarded only for winning.

That way, the FA need never pay him anything.

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Platell’s People: Not having children’s a tragedy not a soundbite for TV, Lisa